OPEC oil producers were set to cancel next week's ministerial meeting, confident that they can simply implement a planned increase in supply quotas without endangering oil's price boom. "The meeting has been cancelled after consensus among member states," a senior OPEC official told by telephone. An OPEC spokesman said that a decision would be announced officially from the group's Vienna Secretariat later on Thursday.
OPEC will enforce a planned 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) increase in formal quotas from August 1, the spokesman added. OPEC's next scheduled meeting is on September 15. "There was a communication between members, there was no need for this meeting because all of us have already decided to have 500,000 barrels per day from August 1," Kuwait's oil minister Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah told while on a visit to South Korea. The group, which controls around half the world's oil exports, has already raised output limits by two million bpd to 25.5 million bpd from July 1 to cool prices which last month hit a 21-year high. U.S. crude on Thursday was trading at $40.80 a barrel, within $1.50 of June's peaks. The increases mean little for overall supply to the world 81 million bpd market as OPEC members are already pumping way over limits to meet strong demand growth in China and the United States. A survey estimated OPEC production in June, excluding Iraq, at 27.2 million bpd, 3.7 million bpd above the then output ceiling of 23.5 million bpd. The extra OPEC supply has helped replenish crude oil inventories in the United States. "As far as fundamentals there is already oversupply," Iran's OPEC governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili told . But stocks of refined products such as gasoline and heating oil remain below normal levels and OPEC's supply surge has left little spare capacity to cope with any disruption to supply from a major producer.///